The Physics of the CMS Experiment

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will start running 2008 producing proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. Four large experiments will operate together with this accelerator: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. The main scie ntific goal of this project is to understand in detail the mechanism for electro-weak symmetry breaking and to search for physics beyond the standard model of particles. ATLAS and CMS are general purpose detectors designed for search and discovery of new physics, and optimized to search for Higgs and signals of supersymmetric matter (SUSY). In this paper the main features of the CMS detector will be presented and its potential for Higgs and SUSY discoveries will be discussed.